Soul Hackers 2 is like the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull of Megaten. I don't think I've fully processed that it exists, even like a year and a half after finishing it. I think of this game often. It just confuses me - it's like the ultimate monkey's paw. They made a sequel to a 1997 Sega Saturn game that offers basically nothing to someone who loved the original, aside from some terminology carried over.

This game is fine - and I think that's what makes me so bitter towards it. They specifically selected one of the most unique, rough around the edges Megami Tensei games and sanded all of the interesting features down into something more digestable for general audiences. Things like demon loyalty and zoma fusions had so much more potential, but instead of exploring that they were just stripped and replaced with a combat system reminiscent of modern Persona. Dungeon design is repetitive, as is the music. They added in a pointless mascot character, there's nostalgia baiting content locked behind a paywall, and even the game's special Jack Frost variant was only obtainable by pre-ordering.

So many things about this game just reek of marketability and someone in a suit making the decisions, which is pretty funny considering it spends time critiquing capitalism and exploiting nostalgia.

Ringo is a very cool character. There are some standout tracks in the OST too. It's just not enough to justify the rest of the game for me. Some people see that this game is functional and has characters and argue its reception was unfair. I also knew people who saw Crystal Skull as their first Indiana Jones movie who said the same thing.

below is my long thoughts on undertale yellow while i drink alcohol at 1 am on my 24th birthday. cool
SUMMARY: has some amazing art and animation but the storytelling/pacing is very underwhelming and almost nonsensical (and not in the funny undertale way, in the bad writing way).

the cast is where the problems lie the most— the amount of characters that interrupt your adventure to block your path or become important named npcs feels really overbloated and they become more like intrusions than characters i can come to like. undertale’s central cast is pretty small (I would say this is toriel, sans, papyrus, undyne, alphys, and maybe asgore. essentially all the characters onscreen in the true pacifist end) and you spend a good time with each of them, with some optional moments to make even more of a bond with them (dating sidequests) sprinkled over the game. yellow’s cast isn’t nearly as cohesive and they just keep introducing characters back to back that it’s hard to tell who you should be caring about and it gets… frustrating? in snowdin you have nearly back to back introductions for martlet, the ice pops guy, the usps whale, and the cupgame guys, the latter three just popping up right in the middle of your way and disrupting your gameplay almost back to back. compared that to snowdin with sans and papyrus who are the main characters you speak with/have fun moments with until it crescendos into the papyrus fight (there are some bosses but theyre bosses, vs sans and papyrus who appear frequently enough that you know they will be essential characters).

i think what also doesn’t help this lack of cohesion with the cast is lack of cohesion in motive. ex in undertale:
-toriel (does not want to let you go because she is scared about asgore)
- sans/papyrus (papyrus wants to be royal guard. wants to send you to asgore)
- undyne (royal guard. killing you for asgore)
- mettaton (under alphys’s command who serves asgore. killing you (to make alphys look cool but also) to take your soul for asgore)
along the way you also fight various knight characters who you can assume serve undyne/asgore and would take your soul to him/you to him if you lose. on top of enemies with just personal grievances (like muffet for being mean to spiders). they’re all united around the idea that youre a human, you are the seventh soul, you are going to die.
in yellow, i really feel like they forgot clover was a human a LOT and just threw random fights together because it was cool. dalv’s story was vaguely written and as a result not compelling or interesting (you can maybe guess that the human he saw was related to clover?? but he never appears again so it does not fuckin matter), martlet acknowledges you’re a human but they’re bumbling over themself so hard i can’t even tell what their motive is, the rhythm game guy came out of nowhere to do rhythm game things and just left, the people in the wild east sort of acknowledge you’re human but dont make any interesting commentary on how their king wants your soul (from what i remember???).

more spoilery thoughts:

clover’s keyword being “justice” (vs frisk’s “determination”) also feels flawed to me. on paper it’s an interesting idea, especially the idea of a child purposely falling down because other children have gone missing— the opening and item description for the missing child poster makes it seem like clover has the intent to find these children (or in the poster desc., i think the flavor text says “there must be justice” or something). but this motive of clover’s… is never expanded on?? it feels like they forgot about it, that they forgot about the whole ”looking for missing children” motive in favor of gushing about their ocs the whole runtime. really this game’s main issue is it feels like a game where you need to already know the ocs beforehand through lore you read in a google doc from a friend, THEN you play it.

“justice” feels forgotten about with the exception of the genocide route which honestly makes the most sense for me. but this isn’t really good. frisk’s “determination” can go both ways (determination to kill everyone, determination to save everyone. it’s about your mindset). the idea of “justice” feels firmly rooted in a negative kind of emotion for the person who is on the receiving end. i can’t imagine a time where justice was served where both sides of the situation both had positive experiences. especially so because clover is a cowboy— if you think of a cowboy who wants to get justice, you are going to think of a cowboy killing those that have wronged them. wild west style. But it’s an undertale fangame so you don’t WANT your motif to be something so outright negative. but then the motif is in full swing only in the genocide run. this feels very counterproductive.

(clover deliberately falls down to get justice for the five missing children but then in true pacifist comes to the conclusion to willingly give up their soul?? to the society that took the five children’s lives???? where is the “justice” here? and i think this could work if clover got blackpilled on the relations between monsters and humans like, if they went throughs some truly harrowing shit and found out it was all the humans’ fault, and the humans who fell down were evil, so then they give up their soul to aid the monsters as “justice” on the side of the monsters. the true pacifist ending just makes nooooooo sense to me when you try to tie it into anything we know about clover)

flower inclusion is also a bit… weird. his gambit is he wants to get you over to asgore’s asap so he can steal the human souls. i do not get the logistics of this to be honest. in undertale flowey’s choice to wait until six souls are gathered (and to use them to get frisk’s soul, so seven total) seems to be on purpose because that amount of souls will make him the Most Powerful. if flowey wanted power so bad, why would he drag clover all the way to asgore’s… flowey steals the souls offscreen in the undertale true pacifist ending so this implies he can just Do That If He Wants. why wouldn’t he just steal the souls and then smack clover upside the head to get their soul with his newfound power? is any of this making sense? i feel like they just needed a really contrived reason to get flowey to show up so much (compared to frisk being the last human needed (plot relevant) and frisk reminding flowey of chara (character relevant).
flowey talking at every save point is slightly grating because you know that flowey is not actually a good person so you’re waiting for the eventual betrayal reveal and thus all the “gee whiz! you’re the bestest friend ever!” text he has feels pointless to read.

the flowey boss fight w clay is cool. the everything else looks like sonic.exe

i think that’s every thought i had. the art and animation is great i just wish they had as many talented writers as they did talented artists. maybe i just “didn’t get it” but this failed to capture what made undertale’s story so great.

Despite its many controversies, South Park remains a funny and strong series that often manages to provide a refreshing satire of contemporary issues. Not only ago, the series had ventured out into video game territory, and one of its entries is South Park: Phone Destroyer.

From its early hours, Phone Destroyer was able to entertain me, with it being able to capture, not only the humor of the series but as well as its unique art style. It's a shame though that aside from its presentation, the game has little to no other redeeming qualities.

The gameplay, while starting easily enough, gets progressively difficult the longer that you play, almost to the point of unwinnable during its middle point. The only way to remedy this seems to hinge on luck or resorting to buying the game's microtransactions using real-world money - an aspect that considerably dampened my interest in the game.

And its a shame because the game had the potential and had a somewhat interesting to story. Too bad, the game is riddled with your typical greedy mobile game predatory tactics. This is disheartening, as it detracts from what could have been a more fulfilling game.